Studying Systems by Studying Myself · 8:25am Nov 10th, 2021
A few acid trips ago, I realized that--as a creative type who loves understanding how things work, with numerous interests and a hard time focusing on just a few--I should study systems in general to understand how everything works. The universe is fractal in nature, after all, so understanding one aspect of one system illuminates understanding of aspects of other systems. Blood vessels, ant trails, freeways--are they so different?
More recently, I've realized that, as someone who is massively dysfunctional (as my stories and blogs have probably made abundantly clear), if I want to study systems, I myself would be a great place to start as a case study on how to improve them.
So today I did, with some old school pencil and paper. Felt weird and good to do something like that not on a computer again. And to unintentionally revisit concepts from calculus The topics? Effort and Focus, both things I struggle mightily with. Anyway, here's what I came up with over several hours! Second picture is my favorite one.
Page 1 (of 6): Good and Bad Habits
Page 2: A Model of Work and Effort I'm too lazy to rotate properly (Fuck, I'm a Boomer now!)
Page 3: More Habit Comparison and Effort Availability Boosters
Page 4: Types of Focus part 1
Page 5: Types of Focus part 2 (in which I wish I had an extra axis/dimension of existence for visualization purposes)
Page 6: Further Research Possibilities (Like half my diet has been Halloween candy but I'm losing weight thanks to all the stimulants I'm tapering off now that the most stressful and time sensitive part of moving is wrapped.)
I don't quite understand what's going on, but it's still pretty interesting? :O
5605495
Basically I'm tapping into my Twilight sparkle side.
Aren’t there editable apps for these?
5605743
Probably. In what way do you mean? Like for note-taking can brainstorming and stuff?
5606162
Yeah, especially the ones where it’s not just notes and you can edit and move around the thoughts.
You're going down a similar path I did a few years ago, and that's pretty exciting
.
I went back-and-forth between the two directions (systemizing very diverse things and systemizing myself), and I kept doing that for several years. It looks like you're primarily interested in motivation and attention. If you want to use systems intuition to understand yourself more broadly, I can recommend additionally looking at (1) what mental models you use to frame concepts, and (2) the connections you form between concepts.
A bunch of my blog posts are actually on topics of systemizing myself.
This one is on charting out my motivations: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/908862/the-greatest-spell
This one is a trick I use for making mental models more explicit: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/910825/shapes-and-colors
This one is about modeling purpose: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/917056/cutie-marks
And I've just started trying to go in the reverse direction (modeling myself and using that as a starting point for understanding systems): https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/971567/elements-of-persona
I'm really curious to see where you go with this.
By the way, I can only see your first two images. There are timeouts and "upstream errors" with the other four.
Edit: I can see the images now.
Second edit: Also potentially relevant, here's a blog post where I use my model of myself to create a new model: https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/931528/the-study-of-darkness
5611478
Thank you so so so much and I'm thrilled to hear that you found this interesting and have been on a similar journey. I can't look at these right now but I will in the near future and if you don't see me comment on them in the near future please gently remind me. I love connecting with people and networking and I hope to stay in contact and talk about this stuff more. Do you ever go to conventions?
5611483
Will do, and I do go to conferences, usually at Bad Horse's prodding. I think we met at Bronycon one year, probably with Bad Horse, Nyronus, and a few others. This year, I was EFNW. I'm not sure which one(s) I'll go to next year.
I would love to talk about this stuff more. I feel like there so much interesting and under-explored stuff here.
5611483
Reminder! And Happy Hearth's Warming!
5621211
Thank you it's funny because I've been thinking about systems a bunch more lately in fact I'm about to post what I think is a pretty great quote I came up with in a blog